Skip to content
worldfires
en
RU · Russia · →

Vilyuysky Ulus fire, 7 July 2018 Vilyuysky Ulus

Out · last detection 20 Jul 2018, 06:04 UTC

The fire started on 7 July 2018 in Vilyuysky Ulus, Russia, and satellites saw it burning for 14 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 13,498 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 384th largest in Sakha Republic since 2016 (of 1422 with a page). Number 94 in Russia in 2018, of 540.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Vilyuysky Ulus · 2017Vilyuysky Ulus · 2018Vilyuysky Ulus · 2018Vilyuysky Ulus · 2018

Burnt area
13,498ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
14days
7 Jul 2018 – 20 Jul 2018
Municipalities hit
1
districts
Started on
7 Jul
2018
Heat detections
2,251
in a single hotspot: 339 MW
Danger at start
2
Very low · FWI index
Average daily power
2.1GW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 7 Jul20 Jul
20 Jul 2018

How it evolved, day by day

7 Jul 2018 · 14 MW · 4 10 Jul 2018 · 192 MW · 45 11 Jul 2018 · 1,020 MW · 81 12 Jul 2018 · 30 MW · 11 13 Jul 2018 · 1,871 MW · 238 14 Jul 2018 · 1,280 MW · 173 15 Jul 2018 · 2,112 MW · 198 16 Jul 2018 · 216 MW · 67 17 Jul 2018 · 3,837 MW · 447 18 Jul 2018 · 3,754 MW · 437 19 Jul 2018 · 4,460 MW · 266 20 Jul 2018 · 7,015 MW · 284
7 Jul 11 Jul 13 Jul 15 Jul 17 Jul 19 Jul 20 Jul

Fire radiative power detected each day, in megawatts, and number of hotspots. The magenta bar marks the peak day.

The weather it burned in

29°high
41km/h · peak gust
29%lowest humidity

It had gone 0 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 3.7 mm on 22 Jul.

This area had burned before

2% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 308 ha in 2017.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 8.5% of the area of London (135 km² against 1,583 km²).

London boundary: geoBoundaries · Office for National Statistics (Open Government Licence v3.0).

This compares size, not location: both shapes are at the same scale, north up, centred on each other.

What happened to each town

  1. Vilyuysky Ulus where it started
    13,478 ha reached on 7 Jul
    0.2 %

Burnt area inside each municipality, from crossing the GWIS perimeter with administrative boundaries. The distance runs from the point marking the centre of each area to the nearest fire: staying a kilometre away does not mean it reached the houses.

People and buildings inside the perimeter

GHSL 2020
Built-up area< 0.1 ha
Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there was no noticeable built-up land and almost nobody lived there (GHSL 2020, satellite-based estimate).

This is an estimate on 100 m cells, made from satellite imagery and census data: it does not mean that homes burned or that anyone was harmed. The perimeter also contains land that never burned.

Source: Global Human Settlement Layer (GHS-BUILT-S and GHS-POP R2023A), European Commission Joint Research Centre (JRC), © European Union, CC BY 4.0. Sum inside the perimeter computed by WorldFires. human-settlement.emergency.copernicus.eu

The weather day by day

ECMWF ERA5 reanalysis at the fire location, the standard reference for past weather, and the Canadian Fire Weather Index (the same system Copernicus uses), computed by WorldFires from that data. Days after the fire run until the first rain.

Open-Meteo.com (CC BY 4.0) · Copernicus Climate Change Service (ERA5)

Day High Min. humidity Peak gust Rain Danger (FWI)
7 Jul 28.9 °C 48 % 38 km/h 3.4 mm Very low 2
8 Jul 18.7 °C 70 % 35 km/h 0.2 mm Very low 4
9 Jul 18.3 °C 65 % 36 km/h 0.1 mm Very low 5
10 Jul 26.1 °C 42 % 23 km/h 0.0 mm Low 10
11 Jul 24.9 °C 44 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 13
12 Jul 19.0 °C 47 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 13
13 Jul 23.9 °C 34 % 27 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 16
14 Jul 18.8 °C 39 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 17
15 Jul 20.2 °C 36 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 18
16 Jul 16.6 °C 44 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 17
17 Jul 19.3 °C 36 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 19
18 Jul 17.1 °C 33 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 18
19 Jul 25.7 °C 36 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 19
20 Jul 23.6 °C 29 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm High 23
21 Jul after 17.0 °C 53 % 48 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 19
22 Jul after 14.0 °C 57 % 44 km/h 3.7 mm Very low 3

Before and after, from space

Drag the line to compare the same ground before the fire and after it.

Before · 30 Jun 2018
After · 27 Jul 2018

If the day is cloudy, change the date: each satellite passes once a day. In false colour the burnt ground looks brown or red.

Detections table · 2,251Every satellite heat detection, one by one, with time, satellite, power and coordinates.
⬇ Download CSV Times in UTC. Each detection is a 375 m pixel: a large fire yields hundreds per pass.
Date and timeSatelliteFRP (MW)LatLon

Other fires nearby

All fires in Russia ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Vilyuysky Ulus fire last?
According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 7 July 2018 to 20 July 2018 (14 days). The perimeter dates it from 10 July 2018 to 20 July 2018.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 13,498 hectares (135.0 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Vilyuysky Ulus (13,478 ha, 0.2 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 28.9 °C, humidity dropped to 29 % and gusts hit 41 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 23, class High.
Where does this data come from?
From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Russia (geoBoundaries). It is not an official report.

Where to verify it

A satellite detection is not an official report. Final figures and the fire’s status are published by each country’s emergency service.

Emergency number: 112 · Emergency number and official warnings ›

Satellite cross-check

History of this page · 1 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.
  1. Start date: 10 July 2018 → 7 July 2018.

RSS Changes to this page

Does something look wrong on this page?

This page is built from satellite data and official records, and it sometimes gets things wrong: the wrong dates, the wrong town, two fires merged into one, or something that was not a wildfire at all. If you know this fire first-hand (you live nearby, saw it, fought it or reported on it), tell us what really happened and we will check it.

Report an error
What do you think is wrong?

We will only use your email to reply about this report. Privacy. This is not an emergency service: if there is a fire now, call 112.

How we know this
  • Perimeter: GWIS (Copernicus), rebuilt from heat detections rather than mapped on imagery.
  • Dates adjusted with the VIIRS detections inside the perimeter, which said 10 July 2018 to 20 July 2018. 2,251 Suomi-NPP VIIRS detections on those dates.
  • We have not matched this page with any official record.
  • Weather: Copernicus ERA5 reanalysis at the fire location, in cells of about 25 km.
  • Built-up area and population come from the JRC Global Human Settlement Layer (epoch 2020, 100 m cells), summed inside the perimeter: an estimate of what was there, not a damage count.

How we build fire pages: methodology ›

Where this data comes from

The perimeter comes from the Copernicus Global Wildfire Information System (GWIS), which rebuilds it from MODIS and VIIRS heat detections and publishes it under CC BY 4.0. It is not measured on imagery as in Europe, so it is an estimate. Heat detections come from the VIIRS sensors aboard Suomi-NPP and NOAA-20, distributed by NASA FIRMS at 375 m resolution. Municipal boundaries come from geoBoundaries ADM2 (Open Data Commons Open Database License 1.0). The area per municipality is computed by WorldFires by crossing the perimeter with those boundaries, so it may differ from each country’s official figure.